I respectfully disagree.

Reasons 2 to 1,350: More BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRTTTT.

Michael C. Fortner
"Maxim 37: There is no such thing as "overkill".
There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload".

FYI, 1,350 is the maximum number of rounds the A-10 can carry. :)

Tanks move. Slowly. But they can move.

Installations... don't. :)

Gods, I love the A-10. I do occasionally play Ace Combat 7, and I do loves me some A-10 there too.

>The only difference as far as a Warthog is concerned:
>
>Tanks move. Slowly. But they can move.
>
>Installations... don't. :)

------
Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge

Dynamix did work on Sierra's forte, adventure games, they also became the "simulator" arm, releasing stuff like Red Baron and the "Aces over" series. Also interestingly, the game just before A-10? Was the very first Mechwarrior game.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

Indeed. They also did the 16-bit remake of Stellar 7, which was basically a home version of Battlezone, and at least two sequels.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I've been trying to remember the name of that game for years.

Peter Eng
--
"Guisers have been deployed..."

For me, though, the best thing about Dynamix was that they were "hometown heroes" - a dev studio located right here in Eugene, OR.

Perhaps an entire squadron of Russian witches...

Well, we've seen that it's possible for a one-legged witch to operate a Striker if she's skilled (and crazy) enough. There's also at least one mention of a witch based on Sir Douglas Bader, an RAF ace who had zero legs, somewhere in the source material, but as there's no illustration of her on the wiki, I don't know whether the witch version is actually missing her legs. (Interestingly, the real Douglas Bader was a friend of Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, the officer on whom Air Marshal Maloney--the man behind Project WARLOCK in the first Strike Witches TV series--was based. One wonders whether the witch version is still speaking to him. :)

Either way, I'm not sure putting a Miyafuji engine on a normal airplane would do anything, but I suppose that probably wouldn't stop a certain personality type from trying it. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

"Perrine, the old man is barking at me. Is this normal?" "Sir, nothing about his Lordship is normal, and I'm sure he would take offence at any implication otherwise."

As a bonus, a witch insane enough to do this could probably work out some way to use her shield to cover her craft. Or at least the parts being shot at.

I fully realize this is probably a vain mental exercise, but I could see it working for someone in that unique position. Perhaps it was even toyed with for witches who were reaching the end of their careers, to give them just a little more time on the front?

...I blame midnight and the hours afterward for this tangent.

Heh, that's not a Miyafuji engine, it's a tiny ætherjet turbine. As yet, I haven't done anything with it. The Most Powerful Belv in the World is the result of honest tuning, an exhaust cutout, and good old Liberion 100-octane aviation gasoline. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

The Belv Spud. A car for the people, specifically the people with some kind of serious mental illness. They drank oil and hated your spines and the gear shifting was... exactly what you'd expect from the phrase "it's trying to sync four gearboxes at once and all the parts are Transbelvian", but they have that cheerful face and profile of every Belv and it's earned the Spud a bit of a cult following amongst collectors of Cold War shitboxes. Indeed, to incorporate better airflow to the rear engines, the front grille and air intake designs have left the Belv Spud's face driving straight past cheery and into the sunlit uplands of heavily medicated. West Germans in particular enjoy Das Super-Belvmann, as they're known over there, and in the crap car aficionado circles of that august nation they are treated with almost reverence. How could something with at least a game stab at suspension have a ride quality that constituted assault and battery? How did downshifting into second from fourth at over fifty miles an hour manage to undo the catch on the bonnet and leave it flapping in the breeze? Where does all the oil go? The general consensus is that the Belv wasn't so much designed as summoned, which goes some way to explaining why half the pictures of this homologation hot-hatch have a wizard hat glued to the roof.

Also the glue probably helps with structural integrity.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

I couldn't resist. Sorry everyone.

Well, not for this stuff, anyway. I mean, it's probably not a great rule for a person's life in general, but you know. This stuff is fun and needs no apologies.

--
dbrandon

--sofaspud
--though the "tear itself in half rounding a hairpin" bit is sadly close to accurate

Toyota has TRD, Honda (sort of) has Mugen, Subaru has STi--every automobile manufacturer with a serious interest in motorsports has a skunk works, a tuning and performance division responsible for taking its everyday products and turning them into roadgoing weapons for the well-heeled and discerning enthusiast, and State Automobile Factory Number 74 is no exception. And what the Third Technical Amplification Design Bureau for Specialist Purposes of State Automobile Factory Number 74 may lack in catchiness of name, funding, tooling, materials availability, testing facilities, and/or personnel who possess actual qualifications, it more than makes up for in sheer readiness to try absolutely any goddamned thing with whatever is available.

G's favorite among the Third Technical Amplification Bureau's many offspring is not the SpUD, although he respects its prowess(?). No, that honor(?) falls instead to the ЮП-1 (commonly described in English-language sources as the SP-1, even though the Cyrillic letters are actually closer to "UP"--you'll see why in a moment). This was a vehicle produced in 1957 for use by the Grand Transbelvian South Pole Expedition, which was Transbelvia's principal contribution to the International Geophysical Year, and it came about almost completely by mistake.

You see, when the order arrived from the State Ministry of Machinery for Transportation Purposes for Automobile Factory Number 74 to build the SP-1, the plant's personnel were completely unprepared for what the Ministry was demanding of them. The requirements set out by the specification documents they received were completely beyond anything they had ever attempted to build. The SP-1 was to be colossal—25 meters long, 12 meters wide, weighing as much as 100 tons, with a meteorological laboratory, an onboard maintenance workshop, and full accommodations for a crew of eight men and six sled dogs. It had to have an operational range of 8,000 kilometers and carry enough supplies to operate independently for a full year, and be fitted with an engine powerful enough to move all that across the Antarctic ice at a maximum speed not less than 45 kilometers per hour.

And it had to be ready to ship out in six months.

Autmobile Factory Number 74's engineers were aghast. Up to that point, the largest and most powerful vehicle the plant had ever produced was the Belvochnik ("Belv Worker") pickup truck, which was... well, a Belv with a pickup body. Their wildest unrealized dreams of larger vehicles extended no further than one engineer's wish that they could maybe build a Belvochnik flatbed. They didn't have the tooling, the machinery, the designs, or the expertise to meet any one of the SP-1's design goals, much less all of them.

So, they did what Transbelvian industrial workers have always done when called upon by the State to do something completely outside their qualifications, competencies, or material capabilities, and just started throwing stuff at the wall to see what they could get to stick. The result, proudly delivered to the Transport Ministry in exactly five months, three weeks, seven days, twenty-three hours, and fifty-six minutes, was... well, it was the SP-1, is what it was.

In order to traverse the Antarctic ice and snowfields with such a huge and heavy vehicle, the designers had to reduce ground pressure by spreading it over a large area. Ordinarily this would be achieved either with enormous wheels fitted with low-pressure balloon tires, as in the American Antarctic Snow Cruiser, or caterpillar tracks, as in the Soviet "Kharkovchanka". Third Bureau didn't have access to anything as sophisticated as crawler tracks, nor did they have a wheel foundry large enough to make Snow Cruiser-style wheels (nor any way to get tires for them, even if they could make them). They did, however, have access to an effectively unlimited supply of standard 25-centimeter Belv wheels and their accompanying tires.

So they used those.

Four thousand of them.

Arranged in 80 rows of 25 pairs each, evenly distributed about the underside of the vehicle.

In order to power this mighty assemblage of wheels, the SP-1's engineers faced the same problem as with the wheel supply: lack of access to, or facilities to make, a power plant on a scale even resembling that required. All they had was the standard 800-cc, four-cylinder, two-stroke gasoline engine that powered each and every Belv.

So they used those.

Two thousand of them.

Each powering one pair of wheels through a regular three-speed gearbox.

In his memoirs, the one and only certified SP-1 driver described the experience of operating the machine in the field as being "like conducting a symphony orchestra made up entirely of violent lunatics, while manning a busy telephone exchange alone." But he was lucky compared to the two members of the crew whose job was to keep the SP-1 working.

During the presentation ceremony at the factory, miraculously, all systems were fully operational. The smoke plume from the 2,000 two-stroke engines could be seen as far away as Budapest, where hundreds of concerned citizens phoned the fire service warning of a forest fire to the east, and the noise they made was characterized by one observer as "beyond description". Once it reached Antarctica, however, it is estimated that at no point during the vehicle's operational lifespan were more than half of its engines working, and the two-man maintenance team were run off their feet keeping that much of the insanely complicated powertrain functional.

Another innovative feature of the SP-1 was the storage system for that year's worth of provisions: a collection of steel racks, made from bent concrete reinforcing bar, welded to the roof. Cold storage? Is no problem, Comrades! You are in Antarctica! Security, baaah! Who is going to steal from you? Penguins?

Inside, the living quarters could best be described as... spartan. Except for the kennel for the sled dogs. Dogs in Transbelvia have always lived better than the majority of the people, and the dogs of the South Pole Expedition were no exception.

The "meteorological laboratory" required by the design spec consists of the following specialized equipment:
- an anemometer on the roof above the driver's cab;
- a thermometer affixed to the hull just outside the main entry door; and
- a roof hatch.

The maintenance workshop is a bench vise attached to one end of the counter in the galley, with a hammer and a bastard file hanging from chains on the wall next to it. To be fair, this is pretty much all you need to work on the parts of a Belv engine. Or 2,000 of them.

The driver's cab is not connected to the rest of the vehicle's interior spaces. This is something of a blessing, since it means it's the only compartment that isn't constantly full of exhaust fumes and/or gas-oil mix vapors, so the driver--the only member of the crew who really needs to be--is, if not sober, at least not high on vaporized hydrocarbons.

With enormous fanfare and a full turnout of the factory's personnel, the completed SP-1 was turned over to a bemused official of the Transport Ministry on October 3, 1957--bemused partly because he was seeing the SP-1 for the first time, which would bemuse anybody, but mostly because the assignment to build it was supposed to go to Locomotive Factory Number 74. Before he arrived he had no idea why Automobile Factory Number 74's managers had invited him there, nor what the hell they had been up to for the past six months.

The next day, the USSR launched Sputnik 1, which rather stole any headlines the SP-1 might have garnered outside of Transbelvia, but many Transbelvians still consider the South Pole Expedition's principal transport to be the more impressive technological achievement. After all, Sputnik 1 worked for barely three weeks and had burned up in the atmosphere by early January. As of this writing, the SP-1 is still functioning as the central building of Transbelvia's tiny Antarctic research station. Sure, it hasn't moved since April of 1958, but the State Ministry for Science, Exploration, and Production of Smoke-Preserved Meats (just... don't ask) still insists that it could if they wanted it to.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

<o

I salute you both, and may glory and honor find you alongside the incomparable Belv.

------
Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge

Does “Team Shark” make an annual pilgrimage, then?

Eh?

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Rambling through the forums and just came across this, noticed I'd never answered, so:

In the first OAV covering the Oarai High School's second year of their Miho-Nishizumi-lead Sensha-do team, the team goes hunting for another tank supposedly buried deep within their aircraft-carrier-school-island. Eventually they find their way into the seedy, 'bad neighborhood' part of the ship, where they meet up with a rough-and-tumble gang of delinquents who have posession of the tank in question -- an ancient Mark IV tank from 1917, which they've been using as a meat smoker for their 'bar'. After some mildly aggressive negotiations, they agree to field the tank on the team's behalf, with ... somewhat mixed results.

Oh, that explains the pirate-themed character I've seen here and there.

>who have posession of the
>tank in question -- an ancient Mark IV tank from 1917, which they've
>been using as a meat smoker for their 'bar'. After some mildly
>aggressive negotiations, they agree to field the tank on the team's
>behalf, with ... somewhat mixed results.

Honestly, in a league where teams are fielding tanks from late World War II, a barbecue is probably the best use a team could have for a Mk IV. That or a clubhouse.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Yep. Imagine the squad set out to greet their opponents for the start of the battle, but one of their tanks is late... and then up comes trundling this truly staggeringly ancient rhomboid thing, complete with a thirty-foot-tall mast flying a giant skull-and-crossbones flag.

It did actually prove useful in the match, but, well. Not for anything involving what you or I might consider "normal tank duties".

>
>Honestly, in a league where teams are fielding tanks from late World
>War II, a barbecue is probably the best use a team could have for a Mk
>IV. That or a clubhouse.

No arguments there. But then sensha-do has never particularly made sense. (I remain convinced that it's all effin' magic. The form Miho fills out back in ep 1 lists 'magic' and 'ninja' as clubs available to join... My headcanon is that the tanks are enchanted, which is why nobody ever seems to get even seriously hurt doing all this shooting at each other with live ammo. And how a few hours of elbow grease, suds, and a water hose turn a handful of rusted hulks into gleaming ready-for-combat AFVs.... it's the activation ritual for their maintenance enchantments.)

That is just so right :-D

Then, the two days later, CNN reported that an A-10 did the EXACT same thing in Desert Storm, with the same results, turning the Hind into Swiss Cheese. My second favorite memory of that game right there. The #1 favorite was it's theme song. On the Amiga, it was glorious.

Michael C. Fortner
"Maxim 37: There is no such thing as "overkill".
There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload".

Which is weird, because it's clearly the original HBK-4G Hunchback. I wouldn't have thought that would even require discussion, let alone defy a conclusion. :)

- slow
- sturdy
- asymmetrical
- built around a bigger gun than it really has any business carrying
- did we mention slow

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I honestly don't recall that coming up as an option (although it's been 35 years, so I may be misremembering.) But looking at the stats, it looks like the lack of range was a dealbreaker. Da 'Hog isn't "part of the second wave, exploiting any weaknesses in the enemy's armor after they've been softened up."

It's the one that softens the enemy's armor all by itself. ;)

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

It needs foot spikes like a Glitter Boy. Piloting check if you don't deploy them, ½ normal movement the next turn if you do (because of the time needed to retract them). If you take a leg crit that puts one of them out of action, well... good luck. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Or those flip-down foot things they used on the Liger Zero Panzer in ZOIDS.

I would tend to chalk that up to the fundamental difference between aircraft and ground units. After all, if you don't take that into account, the A-10 is already in the game, except it's called the 'Mechbuster and looks more like a MiG-21 with a gland problem.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Could easily be the case, yeah. I was only a BattleTech fan for a relatively short time.